S4E151 How Is The Mediterranean Diet Impacting The Meat We Are Raising On Our Homestead?

Perhaps the biggest impact the Mediterranean Diet has had on how we homestead is on the animals we are raising for meat.  On this episode we dive into what those changes are.  

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Brian

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So on last week's episode, we talked about how the Mediterranean diet is impacting what we are growing here on the homestead this year. And if you didn't listen to that episode, we'll go back and listen to it. But spoiler alert, well it's really not impacting much with regards to what we're growing here on the homestead because, well, a lot of the things that. Are suggested for the Mediterranean diet that can be grown in beautiful upstate New York. I already grow but when it comes to what we are raising here on the homestead, the Mediterranean diet really is having a huge impact for us in that area. I am your host, Brian Wells, and I'm a fourth generation homesteader Since 2008, my family and I have been homesteading here in beautiful upstate New York. In 2019, I launched the Homestead Journey Podcast to help people just like you get started and find success on their journey towards self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and sustain. This is the Homestead journey and this is season four. Well, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, everyone. I am still really, really enjoying that intro music. Uh, it hasn't gotten old on me yet, so I hope you're enjoying it as well. I don't know, it just gets me all jacked up. Jazzed up, ready to go. And ready to record yet another episode of the Homestead Journey Podcast. As the intro says, this is season four. This happens to be episode number 151. My name is Brian Wells and I am coming to you from three B Farm and Homestead here in beautiful upstate New York. Now on this episode, we are going to continue our series on the Mediterranean Diet. As you can see, if you are watching this on YouTube, rumble, Odyssey, all of the visual places. Well, the seat to my left is empty once again, today I am flying solo, but hopefully Bonnie will be back with me on the next two episodes. But on this episode, well, I'm. It's just my ugly mug and my perhaps irritating voice. That's all you're gonna be hearing on this episode. but this episode is going to be all about how the Mediterranean diet is impacting what we raise here on three B Farm and Homestead this year. But before we get into all of that, let's jump on over to this week's Homestead happenings, and I will bring you up to speed with what we've been doing here on three B Farm and Homestead. Now I am actually recording this episode a little bit earlier in the week than I normally do. Um, normally I record these podcast episode. Usually Saturday nights, Sunday nights, mainly it's been Sunday nights, but this week for a whole host of reasons I am recording this midweek. It's actually Wednesday night, and so my list of things that we've been up to here on the homestead is going to be relatively short, but you may find that to be a blessing, so let's jump right into it. So the first thing I wanted to share with you is that I did actually follow through on what I talked about on the previous episode with regards to getting my grape cuttings and my current cuttings into water to try to get them to root so that I will have more grapes and more currents to plant. Now, this is an experiment that I did start last year and it really did get off to great success. The cutting started to develop leaves and uh, I think they were starting to root. But to be honest with you, I just didn't pay that much attention to it. And eventually the water all evaporated and everything all dried up and those cuttings. Tossed over the hill, uh, so to speak. So this year, my hope, my plan is to well follow through on this experiment and to hopefully get some roots. Developed and then get those cuttings into some soil and get them into tiny little plants that I can then propagate and perhaps, as I mentioned on, uh, last week's episode, maybe even sell and use them to generate some income here for the homestead. Now a bit of an update with regards to the seed starting system. It is just really holding very nicely at a, at a constant, uh, temperature in the, in the mid seventies, which actually might be a little too warm. I may need to put a little bit of venting in there. I actually don't even have any heat mats going in there. This is all just being generated by the lights and then that enclosed space. I have everything right now wrapped in clear garbage bags to kind of create that greenhouse effect. And it does seem that everything is maintaining moisture nicely. So we will certainly see over the next a couple of weeks whether or not this experiment does work. But I have every confidence in the world that it's going to. I have no reason to believe that it shouldn't. And uh, so very excited about how this is working out so far in. Unheated basement. The last thing I wanted to mention was just an update with regards to the Southern Adirondack Home Setting Festival that's coming up on May 19, 20 and 21. The planning for that is coming along very, very well. We've got sponsors coming on board. We have a whole bunch of vendors that are stepping up to the plate. Um, it's gonna be a great event, folks, and so I highly encourage you to, uh, to come join. In beautiful upstate New York. If you are anywhere near here or you can get here, I certainly don't think you're going to want to miss it. So if you have any interest in it at all, head on over to my website, the homestead journey.net/festival, and there you will find a little bit more information about it as well as a link to be able to buy some tickets. I am so excited about this event, folks. But a development that I wanna share with you is that Jack, uh, poner from the mindful homestead reached out to me and he said, Brian, I've got an idea for you. Said, what's that Jack? He said, during this event, and he said, and then during the home event in the fall, what you need to do is you need to go live and do a broadcast, a podcast live on. And so I am actually going to do that. I'm going to give it a whirl and I, I've got a few ideas in the back of my head. Hopefully I'll be able to pull it all off. But if you are interested at all in catching that, you're certainly going to want to head on over and subscribe to our YouTube channel just so that you will not miss out on us going live during this event. And if everything goes according to plan. Uh, with regards to the Southern Adirondack Home Setting Festival, we will do a repeat in the fall at the homesteaders of New England fall gathering. And even if everything doesn't go according to plan with regards to this event in the spring, well, maybe it will serve as a learning. Opportunity for me so that we can get everything going according to plan for the fall. But, uh, I'm excited about that. And so, yeah, if, if it, if it's great, I'm gonna claim all of the glory. And if it sucks, it's all Jack's fault. All Jack's fault. All right. Let's jump on over to this week's charting the. So on last week's episode, we talked about how the Mediterranean diet is impacting what we are growing here on the homestead this year. And if you didn't listen to that episode, we'll go back and listen to it. But spoiler alert, well it's really not impacting much with regards to what we're growing here on the homestead because, well, a lot of the things that are suggested for the Mediterranean diet that can be grown in beautiful upstate New York. I already grow but when it comes to what we are raising here on the homestead, the Mediterranean diet really is having a huge impact for us in that area. As we mentioned back when we were talking about the Mediterranean Diet food pyramid, the Mediterranean diet really focuses from a protein perspective on lean protein and seafood. Now as we discuss, certainly I'm not raising seafood here in beautiful upstate New York. If I had more land, I might be able to do ponds and maybe have some fish and things like that, but I don't, so I won't. And so for me, that piece of it is a bit outside of the realm of possibility, but lean protein certainly is within that realm of possibility. And what are some lean proteins? Well, lean proteins would be things like chicken and Turkey and quail and. Now with the exception of quail, we've dabbled in all of those things at one point or another. We've raised standard breed chickens for meat for many, many years. Now. Our approach to doing that has certainly changed over the years. It used to be that I would put those standard breeds into the freezer. Lately we've been pressure canning those when we've dressed off our hands, but that certainly has been a major part of the protein that we have produced for ourselves. We did get into raising meat birds several years ago, and so we've been raising Cornish Cross almost every year, I believe, since 2018. I think we've raised Cornish Cross. It might have even been 2017 when we started raising those. So it's been a little bit since we've been doing those. One year we did a spring batch and a fall batch but since then we have been doing spring batches of meat birds just about every year. Now, this year, due to some circumstances beyond my control, that is namely that my dad is going to have knee replacement surgery. Uh, we have elected to push off our meat birds until the fall, so we're gonna be doing a fall batch of meat birds. Honestly, I can't say I'm too thrilled about that. And the reason being is that in the fall here in New England, well, On the edges. The outskirts of New England, I'll say is where we live here in beautiful upstate New York Fall can be rather unpredictable and so you're never quite sure whether or not you're going to have a nice, warm, sunny day or if you are going to have a very chilly breezy fall. Almost frigid day. And certainly processing meat birds in those kinds of conditions is not really, really fun. Now, that's not to say that when we've processed things in the spring that we've had beautiful sunny bluebird sky days. That's not been the case every time. But there's something to be said about the fact that 40 degrees in. April or May feels much different than 40 degrees in September. It, it just, I don't know how to explain it, but if you live in the area where there are four seasons, you know exactly what I'm talking. That 40 degrees in the spring feels much different than the 40 degrees in the fall. Now I know. Wine, wine, wine, Brian, first world problems, blah, blah, blah. Uh, get over yourself, no. Certainly the Mediterranean diet is not the reason why we are doing the fall meat birds. As I mentioned, it's more of a health issue with my dad than it is anything and honestly, I doubt we will increase the number of birds that we raise simply because Brian Jay's gonna be off to college, we're certainly not going to need as much chicken as we would have in the past. Now, last year we did not do any turkeys. This year we will be doing turkeys but we are going to switch up how we process them. In the past, I've just either left them as holes or halves and put them in the freezer that way. Again, with Brian J going away to college, Bonnie and I simply aren't going to sit down and eat an entire Turkey. And even with Brian J here, a whole Turkey, even a half of Turkey was way too much. And so what we're going to do is we're going to cut the Turkey up into parts and we're also going to do a lot of ground Turkey. Even before we went on the Mediterranean diet, Bonnie was using ground Turkey in place of ground beef. I think a lot of it was just cost, but when we would have tacos, many times our tacos were ground Turkey, they weren't ground beef. so, so we've been used to eating ground Turkey a lot and so we will be doing our own ground Turkey. So that we have that available as a lean protein as well. Now, I have thought about getting back into rabbits, and I've thought about giving quail a try. I've not decided that I'm going to move forward with that. My guess is I'm probably gonna hold off until next year to introduce that for a lot of different reasons. But that certainly is on the radar because both of those proteins would fit well within the Mediterranean diet. While the Mediterranean diet does emphasize lean protein and seafood, it does suggest that you limit your red meat intake. Now, it doesn't say that you need to exclude. As we talked about, the Mediterranean diet is not an exclusionary diet, but in the Mediterranean diet pyramid at the tippy top, that is your red meat and your sweets supposed to limit it maybe, I don't know, once a month, once a week. In a limited fashion. And the other thing that is suggested is that even when you do have it, the meat should be more like a condiment. It shouldn't be like a big, huge 72 ounce tomahawk steak. It should be more of a condiment, so like a ground beef maybe in a las. It's not the main, it's not the main attraction. It's there for a little bit of flavor. Maybe some beef and some beef stew. Your bigger attractions are your vegetables, and so the meat plays more of a condiment type role rather than being the main attraction now, the meat that would fall within that category would be things like beef and pork and lamb and goat. There's probably a few others, but those would be the four main red meats. We don't eat much lamb at all. We might have lamb once a year. We don't eat goat at all here at our house. Anytime I have goat, I'm at a restaurant. I love goat. I love goat so much, but that's just not been something that has been a common part of our diet. But certainly beef and pork have. And pork especi. We're American Guinea hog people, and I am heavy, heavy, heavy into the American Guinea hog breed. In fact, at one point, not by designing, but rather my boars deciding that they wanted to get in with the girls and the girls deciding that they wanted to get in with the boys. We had over 33 pigs here on the homestead. Now we are down below. I'm trying to keep it that way. Um, but certainly we have been heavy into pigs. That's going to change. That is really the biggest change that the Mediterranean diet is having on what we raise and grow here on our homestead. Back in the late fall, early winter, I put my entire herd up for sale. All of my breeding sock is up for sale. All of the feeders, all of the offspring from last year, all of that is up for sale right now. In part because we just don't need that level of pork. We don't need a freezer full of red meat when we're not supposed to be consuming it like we have in the. Now certainly this move, this change is not without controversy. My buddy Jack, uh, from the mindful homestead who I referenced earlier, he disagrees with me, I think very strongly on getting out of. Pigs. And the reason why is because Jack is of Italian descent and he said his grandfather never got the memo that pork isn't a part of the Mediterranean diet. Now, his grandfather's name was Bruno Pelicano it does not get much more Italian than that now. Jack's grandfather Bruno, loved a dish called Cottica, and I'm probably butchering all of these names, but he loved this dish called Cottica, and Jack tells me that his grandmother made it for Bruno very, very often. Now, what is Cottica? Well, Cottica is pig skin cut in strips rolled up and cooked in a tomato sauce. And actually, when I was over at Jack's house for the charcuterie class back in 2021, we actually brought some of the pig skin home and Jack rolled it up and he cooked it in that tomato sauce and then we took it back. The second day and had it as part of the celebration that we did with all of the different types of charcuterie. It was very, very, very delicious. So because Bruno didn't get that memo, And Bruno lived to a very, very ripe old age. Jack thinks I'm crazy for getting out of pigs, and he kind of disagrees with this idea that pork should be limited as part of the Mediterranean diet. Now, to be fair, pork and lamb in particular, but also some goat and beef. Are very common meats in traditional Mediterranean diets. Lamb in particular is a staple in Greece, but also in some of the Muslim countries that make up part of that region. Certainly pork is a huge part of charcuterie, right? Charcuterie. I think Origins are in France, but Italians certainly perfected it. You know, Piccola salami, mor prosciutto, um, Panetta, Pancho, Hamon, chorizo, pat Roulette, all of those very, very common pork based charcuterie type things from that. Many of them from Italy, some of them from Spain, some of them from France, but all very, very common in all pork based. All very delicious ola is air dried salt, beef, And I am just barely scratching the surface of the list of red meat based dishes that fall within, uh, traditional Mediterranean cuisine from that region. But by and large, even when red meat is consum. Bruno Pelicano. Notwithstanding, it does seem that red meat is eaten in far more limited quantities. Than what we are accustomed to eating in the United States. As I mentioned before, people in the Mediterranean aren't sitting down to a 72 ounce tomahawk steak, and my guess is that most Italians don't have the same love affair that Bruno had with Cottica, but all. Doesn't really matter. The fact is based on what we currently understand with regards to the Mediterranean diet, we have made the decision to move away from pigs. Uh, at least for now. Now I'm very, very blessed. I have very easy access here in my local area to pasture raised pork. I know a lot of people who do pasture raised pigs and actually sell it by the pound. So if I want bacon, I can get bacon. If I want good sausage, I can get good sausage. If I want good ham, I can get good ham. I just don't need a freezer full of it. Instead, we'll have our own ground Turkey, we'll have our own chicken, and in the future, maybe a few other things, time will tell. For right now, our focus is certainly going to be on raising more of the lean proteins and less of that tasty, wonderful American Guinea hog. Meet. All right. That's it for this episode. If you have any questions, reach out to me, brian@thehomesteadjourney.net is my email address. You can also find me on all of the socials. I would love to hear from you. And until next time, everybody, keep up the good.